Philosophy and Methodology of Information

The following section is included:

• Contents

The following sections are included:

• The Study of Information (SOI) and Related Research Fields
• Exploring Philosophy and Methodology of Information on Different Levels
• Contributions to the Book
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography

Subject is not an object, at all. This is true as long as we try to analytically purify those notions. We move the objects to one side of the equation, irrespective of their ontological status: material, mathematical, phenomenal objects, even qualia. What’s left on the other side is epistemicity, which is the subject side of the atomic subject–object relationship. On the other side is the theory of potential objects. Only interaction between subject and object results in ontological reality; it allows for information as their shaped relationship. I build very little here, while standing on the shoulders of somewhat unexpected giants: We enjoy early Fichte and Husserl-style pure subject (contra Kant’s transcendental subject busy with categorizing things); Leibniz’s argument that unknowable universes cannot exist segues into the ontological condition of epistemicity; I follow Russell 1921, making a complementary scaffolding that starts by juxtaposing first- and third-person epistemologies; I follow Plato, Peirce, and Burgin in exploring triadic structures that transcend the basis of subject–object complementarity. The non-reducible first-person subject is shown as not merely epiphenomenal. I spend some time demonstrating how privileged access may no longer be quite privileged (Gallant’s experiment) and how Jackson’s Mary’s problem consists in her lacking the word-to-phenomenal-content link in her cognitive architecture. The main point of this part of the argument is to disperse the mist of qualia that hazes over the non-reductive subject. This exposes information as always already information for an epistemic subject, for some general consciousness.

The creation of new ideas, which might contribute to the development of the field of information, is neither a continuous nor a linear process. I have therefore, here, only summarized my published papers in lieu of producing a completely new one. All my prior works involve the application, in information science and philosophy, of the updates and extension I have made of the logical system of the Franco-Romanian thinker Stephane Lupasco (1900–1988). This non-propositional system, grounded in the quantum mechanics of our world, allows inferences to be made about the evolution of complex processes at biological, cognitive and social levels of reality. By placing my papers in conjunction, I attempt to further show here the relevance of this logic of real processes to ongoing studies of the nature and function of information.

The following sections are included:

• Pigeons?
• What Is It All About?
• Beyond the Bits
• Inexistence

On the one hand, although ancient Greek and medieval philosophies discuss “nominalism” and “realism,” the concept of “objective non-reality” is not explained. On the other hand, modern philosophy is unable to guide the development of scientific rationality. It is even challenged by the scientific reason. Until the rise of the contemporary information science revolution, the philosophers have been forced to explore the scope and substance of information. From the viewpoint of the inherent unity of universal rationality in science and philosophy, the Chinese philosopher Wu Kun has revived the concept of “objective non-reality” and developed his “philosophy of information” system. Because the existence of “objective non-reality” is inherently a kind of “crossover” in ontology, it may provide a new solution to the traditional philosophy problems. This may lead to a new paradigm breakthrough in philosophy.

Mencius thought that the difference between human beings and animals is “the four beginnings (or sprouts)”, that is, to sympathize, to feel shame and uneasy, out of modesty and courtesy, and to tell right from wrong, with the “kind mindedness view” as the core concept and good-in-nature theory as the starting point. However, with the rapid development and inspiring enlightenment of biological sociology, it is found that the animal world is also quite complex, and the expression of their behavior and emotion can also be seen as good and evil, which is not unique to human beings. So, Mencius’s “the four beginnings (or sprouts)” as the standard of distinguishing humans from animals deserve further discussion. From the two dimensions of the construction theory of philosophy of information, that is, genetic information as the first dimension of decisiveness, the objective environment (including social factors) as the second dimension of uncertainty, this paper aims to clarify that the evolution of human structure has two dimensions, theory and examples, thus the structures of human beings and animals are different. For the development of animals, there is only one set of processing code, and its final destination can only be animal, but for humans, there are two sets of codes, its final destination can stay in the first dimension, indicating the animal attributes, or follow the second dimension to become people in the true sense rather than a natural human or animal.

Philosophy of information (PI) should not be taken as the study of philosophical problems in information science and information technology, nor be considered as a certain philosophy branch which is affiliated to or can be summed up into any existing traditional philosophy. Philosophy of information, as the metaphilosophy, stands side by side with any other existing philosophical schools. “Partition of the existential field” is the highest paradigm of philosophy; thus, the revolution of philosophy can be brought about only in the level of its highest paradigm. For traditional philosophy, “Existence = matter + mind” is the highest paradigm and also the base of philosophical theories. But until now, the development of philosophy theories hasn’t witnessed any radical change in the level of the highest paradigm (though with exceptions of theories related to God, absolute idea and absolute mind, which have been dissolved in general philosophy field due to the development of science). Contemporary PI has made a new partition of existential field as “Existence = matter + information (mind as the advanced form of information).” PI has achieved fundamental transformation of philosophy for the first time since it triggered radical change in the highest paradigm of philosophy.

In A Short History of Shadow, Victor Stoichita (1997) traces both the origin of the artistic representation and the origin of cognitive representation to the image of shadow. He refers the former to a famous passage from Pliny’s Natural History, according to which painting was triggered by the desire to hold the human shadow, and the latter to the celebrated allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic. Here the shadows have taken on a negative connotation as phantasmata under the guise of real things. By contrast, in Aristotle’s On the Heavens, the argument for a round Earth rests on the outline of its shadow on the moon in eclipses. What makes this argument sound? Can one take a shadow as a reliable source of knowledge? Interestingly, in the Renaissance the “shadow profiles” drew by painting and the “reality show” envisaged by science face each other through perspective drawing. Entangled with light and matter, shadows are visible and changeable, like natural things, as well as immaterial and effective, like ideas. But these are also typical features of information. This paper pursues a deeper understanding of the nature of information, going deeper into the rationale of shadows.

The Philosophy of Information, from the point of view of Luciano Floridi, would deal with a broad set of problems, from informational dynamics, through semantics, intelligence and nature, to the value of information. In the semantic dimension of a relation between philosophy and epistemology, Floridi affirms that Library and Information Science can be recognized as an applied field of the Philosophy of Information. The purpose of this reflection is to reconstruct a discussion that proposes exactly the opposite of Floridi’s understanding. In other words, it tries to take into account the practical demands, modes of representation and symbolic interpretation of the life forms of Library and Information Science. From the thought of Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera, we try to argue how a Social Epistemology, understood as the main structure of the epistemology of Information Science, brings together the social and pragmatic aspects of a criticism into Floridi’s Philosophy of Information. We argue, centrally, that Social Epistemology gives to the Philosophy of Information what contemporary ethical dilemmas related to the information require: the relation between praxis and the symbolic construction of the historical subject. We seek to expose, from a critical point of view of the Philosophy of Information that Social Epistemology provides more plural perspectives to the practical world, place of actuation of informational subjects (human and non-human). Through the discussion of Social Epistemology, we point to a Philosophy of Information’s perspective as an ethical application of the epistemology of Information Science, as implicitly shown, having the relevance for the symbolic sphere as central in the relations among language, society and informational uses.

There is a lot of controversy about discovery and invention in mathematics. Platonists believe that mathematical objects exist as Platonic Ideas and mathematicians only discover them. Pragmatists assume that when mathematicians introduce new objects, they invent and then build them. The reality is more sophisticated and more beautiful because both processes — discovery and invention — took place in mathematics. However, from the perspective of information science, this statement has to be explained in a detailed constructive way. In addition, it needs persuasive arguments in the form of empirical evidence, such that allows to be tested and either approved or invalidated. The goal of this work is to provide such an explanation and empirical evidence validating the claim about existence of both processes in mathematics. This evidence is similar to but does not coincide with empirical evidence in physical sciences.

The frequency of the use of the words data, information, knowledge and intelligence is very high in our current daily lives. We take for granted our understanding of “data” meaning. Then, we have the problem to find adequate relations between data, knowledge, intelligence and information. Horror Vacui and Horror Pleni are two cosmic, fundamental concepts referring to humans’ intellectual operative range which can be used as references. A “non-dual dichotomy” permeating all human representations is the elementary base to start with any more refined conceptual description. We introduce the “evolutive information” concept. Evolutive information is an elusive idea whose specific and contingent understanding involves interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, cultural and ontological multi-perspectives, to arrive to Cybersemiotics. To really understand evolutive information, we need to analyze the strong, resonant coupling between processes related to action and perception which emerges in the human brain as a consequence of learning sensorimotor task. To survive successfully the Fourth Industrial Revolution and to achieve an antifragile behavior, next generation human-made system must have a new fundamental component, able to address, to face and to solve the problem of arbitrary multiscale evolutive information ontological uncertainty management in an instinctively sustainable way: bottom-up active wisdom by design!

The concepts of information, computation, and cognition are variously interpreted and explained, and still lead to ambiguous results. I will contend that seeing the evolutionary emergence in humans of information, meaning, and of the first kinds of cognition as the outcome of dynamic coevolutionary interactions between brain/mind internal processes, body itself, and external environment can be extremely useful (1) to clarify the most common misunderstandings and the basic vagueness of the concepts above, and (2) to appropriately describe “computation” as an evolving concept subjected to continuous transformations of meaning. To this aim, I will also take advantage of the dynamic concepts of salience and pregnance derived from Thom’s catastrophe theory. When physical computation is seen in the perspective of the ecology of cognition, it is easy to understand Turing’s original ideas concerning the emergence of information, cognition, and computation in organic, inorganic, and artefactual agents, I will also briefly illustrate in this chapter. I will show that seeing computation as dynamically active in distributed physical entities of various kinds suitably transformed so that data can be encoded and decoded to obtain appropriate results further sheds light on what I call eco-cognitive computationalism. I hope it will become clear that eco-cognitive computationalism does not aim at furnishing an ultimate and static definition of the concepts of information, cognition, and computation, such as a textbook could provide, instead it intends, by respecting their historical and dynamical character, to propose an intellectual framework that depicts how we can understand their forms of “emergence” and the modification of their meanings.

This study compares two conceptualizations of information: one based on the concept of difference (the famous Bateson’s “difference that makes a difference”) and the other rooted in the one–many opposition (present author’s “identification of a variety”). After an extensive review of the philosophical context of the concept of difference and a brief outline of the philosophical foundation of one–many opposition, mathematical formalisms are presented for both. Then overarching formalism uniting these formalisms is proposed. The comparison of theoretical aspects of the two approaches shows that the former conceptualization in terms of difference cannot be applied to some forms of information, which can be conceptualized in the latter approach (e.g. topological forms of information).

The mechanism-based artificial intelligence theory extracts the common characteristics in structuralism, functionalism and behaviorism, the three major schools of AI, and promotes it to be a united mechanism of the transformation from information to knowledge. This article aims to introduce factors space, the mathematical basis for the mechanism-based artificial intelligence theory. Factors space is a promotion from fuzzy sets, formal concept analysis and rough sets, which provides a generalized framework for information description, and taking concept-generation, causality inductive under the framework. Factors space can help AI to do rational thinking such as prediction, identification, control, evaluation and decision making by factorial algorithms easily and fast. The paper will focus on how to describe formal (grammar) information, and how to transform it to be semantic knowledge according to the requirement of utility (pragmatics) information. The paper provides a preliminary mathematical description on the first law of information transformation established by the mechanism-based artificial intelligence theory. It also takes the tic-tactoe as example, to express how to combine the target factors and the scene factors, which may be helpful for the mathematical description on the second law of information transformation. A brief outline on the history of factors space is also given in the paper.

With the view to the ongoing project of re-interpreting the Blochian concept of the “darkness of lived immediacy”, possible relationships between philosophy and the sciences on the one hand, and in particular, between Blochian concepts and modern chaos theory and fractality on the other, are discussed in some formal detail. The objective is to demonstrate that scientific categories can be helpful when applying them to categories of the humane sciences (and/or philosophy proper) and might lead beyond the mere metaphorization of concepts as it is fashionable today in many fields. Though metaphorization is certainly a hermeneutic technique in its own right, the foundation of applications within a wide range of research topics can be improved when looking more closely at the precise and formally correct aspects involved. Such an approach, which is taking care on what ground the concepts, formal or hermeneutic, are actually built, is not only suitable as to the relationship of philosophy and the sciences, but also with a view to the arts. As it turns out, the aesthetical attitude towards the world is somewhat complementary to the conceptual attitude after all. Hence, in principle, do both of them serve the same objectives of orientation within a complex world.

Information is a complex and evasive concept, whose resolution or clarification involves different disciplinary, cultural, and above all, ontological perspectives. Even defending here a non-naive realist approach to information, we can infer from cultural psychology/anthropology, as well as from other branches of cognitive sciences, a fundamental bias or pattern: the situated nature of ontology. This explains why information is not a fact to be captured but a relational interaction between some sets of data and a cognitive entity. These sets of data are system-related and can only be understood as partial captures of structural meanings. There is no holistic, comprehensive understanding of an information event (the failure of Leibnizian monads). Instead of this, we find some heuristic approaches to reality, which are flavored by cultural-oriented ontologies. There is also a fundamental role of morphological cognitive aspects to be taken into account. A deep analysis of this fact can help us understand not only how informational events are created (like the recent stunning Google’s AI system AlphaGoZero strategy) but also how non-human informational reasoning approaches are possible and increase the horizon of the ontological ways of dealing with information.

How to build a unified information science paradigm? Wolfgang Hofkirchner believes that we need a unified information concept first. Then, where does this unified information concept come from? It cannot be a variant of the concept from specific fields of sciences and technologies. Meanwhile, it also cannot leech on to the traditional philosophy, treating it as a category or property of matter or mind. Both these approaches cannot achieve a true unification of the concept of information. So, we should criticize any research approach by comparing the concept of information with the categories in traditional philosophy or the concepts from concrete scientific and technological fields. Then, we will have a chance to explore a unified information concept. Hofkirchner gives us a blueprint of information science paradigm. But within this blueprint, the ontological significance of information is not manifested. So, I am going to introduce Wu Kun’s philosophical understanding on the unification of the concept of information. After analyzing, we would find out that Wu’s information philosophy could not only provide a requisite philosophical kernel to the information science paradigm advocated by Hofkirchner, but also exhibit an inspiring approach for the future study of philosophy of information.

In this paper, the author talks about the development of Confucianism in contemporary society. The research on ancient Chinese philosophy, originating from the Shang dynasty (1600B.C.E.–about 1046B.C.E.), or Confucianism especially, should have new features and reflect its contemporary value by considering present practices. This article explores the status quo, reasons and real values of the return of Confucianism from the perspective of Philosophy of Information. It applies humanities approach to the contemporary research on Confucianism and aims to explore how Confucianism plays an active role on the moral level in today’s society on the basis of expounding the reality of Confucianism.

In this chapter, I discuss the ontological presumptions necessary to produce a transdisciplinary information philosophy and information science that go beyond mechanicism, dualism, as well as first- and second-order cybernetics. It is found necessary to integrate the qualitative philosophies of phenomenology and hermeneutics in order to encompass the area of human’s and all living systems’ meaningful cognition and communication. However, the conceptualizing of cognition and communication through phenomenology, hermeneutics, and semiotics seem incompatible with an info-computational framework. A non-dual pragmaticist semiotic-processes-based philosophical framework named Cybersemiotics, built on the philosophical basis of C.S. Peirce’s triadic semiotic pragmaticist philosophy, is suggested by integrating cybernetic, autopoietics and informational systems with Peircean semiotics to make true transdisciplinary models of cognition and communication, crossing the physical, the biological, the psychological, and the social aspects of reality.

The transition from a fragmented landscape of information fields towards a consistent disciplinary body or unified “information science” is discussed. Arguably, this transition from multiple scarcely interconnected fields, unrelated if not contradictory with each other, cannot be achieved by simply extrapolating from one of these fields. The possibility of a previous change in the “mode of thinking” about information has to be reckoned with. Herein, we try to advance ten basic principles, understood not in a strict axiomatic way, but taken as crucial interconnecting points that may contribute to establish both a new direction of advancement and a central goal for the cohesion of the new information science. Basically, what these principles attempt is to establish an essential connection with the humanities: the life cycle emerges as the crucial pillar of that tentative conceptual bridge.

The chapter addresses the general problem of assessing the integration of knowledge from different scientific disciplines joined in interdisciplinary settings and its specific application to the study of information. The method is based on the development of Interdisciplinary Glossaries as tools for the elucidation of the network of concepts involved which also serve as proxies of the corresponding knowledge integration. We show the results obtained from the application of the network approach to a specific interdisciplinary glossary devoted to the study of information. These results show the capacity of the methodology depicted to guide the future development of knowledge integration by the corresponding interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams, as well as to assess their integration achievements. However, the results described are rather qualitative with respect to the knowledge integration attainments. In order to offer a quantitative assessment, we propose an enhanced methodology in which each contribution and participant in the elucidation process is identified by the knowledge domains involved using a set of domains adapted from the higher categories of the Universal Decimal Classification. Such identification allows assessing the integration through a multidimensional perspective based on: (i) the diversity of the disciplines involved, measured in terms of Shannon Diversity Index, and (ii) the effective integration achieved through the meeting of different perspectives, measured through the analysis of both the semantic network of elucidated concepts and the network of participant researchers, in terms of the average minimal distance between any two nodes and the clustering coefficient, which are combined through the small-world-coefficient, σ.

Information ecology requires the support of intelligent information processing, while the latter requires the support of mathematical dialectical logic. This paper introduces the research status and prospect of mathematical dialectical logic for intelligent information processing, including the following: (1) several basic assumptions (axioms) about information and intelligence; (2) based on mathematical formal logic, gradual liberalization of the constraints to establish the research compendium of mathematical dialectical logic theory system; (3) according to the formation mechanism of uncertainties, the principles and methods of the complete operator cluster in mathematical dialectical logic on propositional level, establishing the complete operator library of intelligent information processing; (4) two applications for the operator library in intelligent information processing; (5) future work.

Cognitive justice is the necessary condition of social justice. Information ecology is the necessary condition of cognitive justice and pays close attention to the health situation. It is necessary and meaningful to social and cognitive justice. This paper probes the meaning of information justice, the core value and research methodology of information ecology.

A new category of methodology, namely Information Ecology, is summed up from, and proposed for, the information studies in the paper. The following issues are explained and analyzed for the proposal: (1) Why is the issue of methodology important to information studies? (2) What problems does the methodology employed encounter in information studies so far? (3) What is the concept of the methodology of information ecology? (4) What is the relationship between the new methodology and the old one? (5) What progresses have been achieved in information studies since the methodology of information ecology has been employed? Based on all the analyses above, the conclusion is finally made that information ecology is the appropriate methodology for information studies.

The following section is included:

• Author Index